I just came across a great article by Tom Philpott over at Mother Jones. In a nutshell, Philpott lays out how 80% of the beer consumed in America is brewed by two corporate entities; SABMiller and Anheuser-Busch InBev. He also notes that most of the beers these guys make totally suck. You got that right, Tom!

Along with a nice narrative about the rise of craft beer, Philpott shares a chart developed by Michigan State professor Philip H. Howard. The chart shows which corporations owned the various beer brands and their product lines in 2010. While I’m more of a Wolverine guy, this Spartan manages to show how beer brands have been colonized in the petri dish of the adult beverage marketplace in the United States. It’s pretty interesting to see it laid out like this.

It’s good to see a couple of craft brewers rate enough to make the chart, but if this were total sales volume, I bet they’d be so small you wouldn’t be able to read their names if you zoomed in all the way.

I love it! A bubble chart makes relationships so much easier to follow. I’m currently trying to produce a chart like this for my genealogical studies of all the various Molyneux families (and there are lots of them.)

Those 2 megabreweries are also multinational conglomerates, and when you think about shipping beer or ingredients around the world, corporate beer in America isn’t red, white, blue, or green. It’s just pale yellow fizzy.